


The Heart of the Matter

by Lafayette1777



Category: Saturday Night Live, Saturday Night Live RPF, Weekend Update (SNL)
Genre: Angst, Chost, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Ohio, Relationship Confusion, St. Louis, and now drunk also in this one, comedy husbands, everyone is still bisexual and sleep deprived, its just like snl except everything is painful and there are no jokes, they're also trying desperately to repress their feelings, they're on tour and having Feelings, this all happened because of one instagram post ok, what the hell is going on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-30
Updated: 2017-05-30
Packaged: 2018-11-07 00:41:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11047713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lafayette1777/pseuds/Lafayette1777
Summary: Colin and Michael are on tour, and it’s as easy and as difficult as it’s ever been.





	The Heart of the Matter

**Author's Note:**

> i am BACK because i still think the world needs more Chost. this definitely occurs in like the same universe as my other snl fic but im not sure if it’s a prequel or a sequel, because some of the vibes are kind of open to interpretation. make of it what you will. all i know is that Michael Che made a livid instagram post about Colin getting his coat stolen in Ohio while they were on tour together a few months ago and if that ain’t prime Chost material i don’t know what is.  
> i still feel like im gonna get fuckin doxxed/sued for these but you know what? live laugh love. everything’s fine. come at me lorne. michael and colin, do us all a favor and don't google yourselves for a while.  
> anyways yikes thanks for reading folks

“It’s probably full of mercury.”

“It’s salmon that they say is full of mercury,” Colin replies languidly, peeling back the bun of his sandwich with one unconcerned finger. “This is some kind of white fish.”

“Coney Island whitefish,” Che mutters. 

Colin snorts and, through a mouth full of bread and fried fish fillet, says, “Shuddup.”

They’re in a McDonald’s on the outskirts of Cincinnati, sprawled over a booth with a view of the parking lot. Outside, the asphalt is covered by a patchy blanket of dirty snow. From a certain angle, Colin thinks, it actually doesn’t look that different from New York. 

In New York, though, they would not be indulging in McDonald’s to avoid eating bar food for the fifth night in the row, even though the fare here isn’t terribly different. Colin had ordered the fish fillet out of some sort of perverse curiosity. “Freshly harvested from the Great Midwestern Sea, I’m sure,” he’d remarked to Che, as they’d waited for their tray. This was after Che had expressed distaste at Colin’s choice of restaurant, resulting in Colin needling him for his New York snobbery from the perspective of his own “salt of the earth” Staten Island roots. He had not gotten very far in this line of accusation before Che had him in a headlock, and they’d ended up wrestling outside in the gelid afternoon air, warm breaths mixing in the little space left between them until, finally, one of them had had the good sense to let go, to let the gap widen again between their beating hearts. 

Inside, now, Colin feels something worrying and warm in his chest at the memory. He pushes it down with another bite of the mystery fish. 

Che stuffs four mustard and hot sauce doused fries into his mouth and asks, “Should I do that Ohio joke tonight or is that too fucking obvious?”

Colin shrugs. “I thought it was funny.”

“Why am I even asking you?” Che sighs, his exasperated smirk failing to hide the fondness in his gaze. “You think everything is funny.”

“Say whatever you want.” Colin grins, throwing up his hands in surrender. “You’re always funny.”

It should just be a throwaway comment, the sort of meaningless enthusiasm tossed around so often between those who hold mutual respect for one another, but Michael’s eyes freeze on him. Maybe he’s thinking about that moment outside, when their breathless, laughing tussle had gone on just a second too long and Colin had felt the full warmth of Che’s body pressed against his, limbs and hearts and gazes just beginning to fit together in puzzle-like transcendence. 

Or maybe that’s not what he’s thinking at all. 

Colin stuffs the last of his sandwich into his mouth and takes a decisively long swig from the lacquered paper cup to his left. Without lifting his eyes from the gray winterscape out the window to their right, he says, “We should probably head off to the soundcheck.”

 

 

 

The show is as easy as all the others they’ve done so far, and as difficult. He and Michael stand within six inches of each other for hours but Colin looks only at the sea of faces before them, latching onto their expressions only in the aftermath of punchlines, in those moments of cartoonish laughter or shock or some combination of the two. Later, as the audience trickles out of the exits at the end of the show, his eyes are still searching, casting about the dark crevices where even the house lights don’t reach and desperately ignoring the brush of Michael’s shoulder against his. 

“That went alright, didn’t it?” Che asks, voice quiet and vulnerable in the way it only is when the adrenaline is just beginning to wear off, when he’s in-between personas, when Colin is the only one who understands the gap enough to bridge it. 

Colin, a few steps behind, raises an arm to slip around his shoulders but stops himself. “Yeah,” he murmurs lamely, as they trot through the maze of backstage. Che doesn’t look back at him, like he’s aware of the withheld touch. Surely, if they both ignore it, Colin thinks, whatever this is between them will wither away. There’s nothing wrong with denial if it works, if it saves them from the threat of the unknown, of the new and the dangerous. 

The bar next door offers them a round of free drinks, so the two of them and a couple of sound guys amble over in the absence of any better ideas. Michael is already in an argument with the bartender about the Knicks before Colin can even sit down. It takes a while to get enough of a word in around Michael’s soliloquy to order a drink and by the time it gets to him he’s parched, knowing the liquor is only going to make it worse. He throws back the glass anyway, and then a few more, until finally Che shuts up and looks over at him and says, of all things, “Wasn’t your coat on the back of your chair?”

 

 

 

The walk back to the hotel is very, very cold. In the blur of the last few hours, it takes Colin a few moments to realize that his parka is still gone, and that he’s still drunk. As they crunch down the sidewalk, he directs a pair of unfocused eyes at Che, who is typing a furious instagram post with half his face obscured by a thick, snowflake patterned scarf. 

“Someone stole your goddamn coat right off your chair and they didn’t do a fucking thing,” Che grunts, breath coming out in white wisps while he hunches over his phone. “Fuck that bar, man. Fuck Ohio.”

Finally, he looks up at Colin. “Christ, you must be freezing.”

The biting wind and his blood alcohol content seem to be conspiring to render Colin mute in a way he so rarely is. He’s wearing only a dress shirt, his gloves and scarf presumably still tucked into the pockets of his missing coat. Through the shivers, he manages a shrug, and Che just shakes his head in some combination of anger and resignation. He’s shrugging out of his overcoat before Colin can grit out, “You don’t need to do that.”

“Just fucking take it, Jost.”

“M’fine.” He ignores the proffered coat until Che withdraws his hand, which only seems to incense Che further. Colin slips into another dimension for a little while after that, the icy streetlights blurring before his glazed eyes, trusting Michael to lead them back to the hotel. His hands and feet are numb, and the rest of him is getting close. He jolts back into the regular flow of time when the edge of his shoe hits a solid block of blackened ice, but Che grabs his bicep before he can topple over. 

When the swirling in his head clears, he realizes a car has pulled up beside them. 

“Get in,” Che is saying. 

“What?” It feels like his mouth is beginning to freeze. Fuck Ohio, he thinks. Fuck winter. Fuck alcohol. Fuck Michael Che. 

“It’s an Uber. Get in.”

“I thought we were walking—”

But Che is shoving him in the backseat now, and the heater is on full blast. Through the amber haze, Colin hears the driver’s GPS announce that the hotel is still three-quarters of a mile away. 

“I’m saving your life, Jost,” Che says, sliding in beside him. “You can thank me later.”

“Thanks,” Colin replies, feeling himself sober up in the heat. The car pulls away from the curb and into the empty, frozen street. He rubs his hands together fervently in front of the nearest vent. Michael, without a word, covers Colin’s hands with his own until some warmth returns. 

 

 

 

He dreams that he’s back in New York, in one of the 8-H conference rooms, surrounded on all sides by a thousands of tiny origami cranes. They shuffle around in his peripheral vision, fluttering their wings capriciously, but when he turns to look they stare back silently, dead paper folded into a thousand dead stares. 

He realizes that he’s folding more of them, that the entire cast is—all of them, sitting around the read-through table, bits of colored paper disappearing and reappearing beneath their fingertips. His fingers are raw from creasing; the feeling is so real that for a moment, he loses track of his own awareness of the dream. Suddenly it’s just another day at work, another sketch. Another example of his absolute devotion to the show, and to Michael. 

Because it’s Michael’s sketch, he realizes. The cranes are his idea. It’s going to be hilarious, even if he can’t remember the punchline of any of the jokes. The cranes are essential, though. Che’s asked for his help; he’ll fold until his hands bleed if that’s what Michael requires. 

This realization comes with less than a jolt than he expects. It’s hardly surprising, he supposes, given the events of the day. He’ll fold a few thousand cranes for Che in a dream, and Che will angrily offer him his coat and then call them an Uber before Colin goes hypothermic in the wilds of Ohio. Even in sleep, he avoids the implications of the motivations beneath these behaviors. 

He keeps folding. He doesn’t wake until cranes have begun to pile around his feet.

 

 

  
He awakes early, to the sound of Che’s even breaths from the other bed. Colin slithers into a sitting position, pushing hair out of his eyes and reaching for his glasses. He fixes his gaze on the sliver of outside visible through the halfway drawn curtains. It’s another gray day, from what of the Ohio sky he can see. Again, the space between New York and the life on tour seems to narrow—it’s not hard to imagine waking up like this in his office at 30 Rock, one of them on the couch and one of them on the floor, savoring the predawn tranquility of simply being in the other’s presence before the madness of the day commences. He has wondered, often, if Michael ever listens for his breathing the same way he listens for Michael’s. 

The agenda for the day is to fly to St. Louis, where they’ll have a couple hours before the show to wander around. This, because one of the more entertaining road managers went to Wash U and claims to have actually left campus enough over his college career to know the best places to get pre-show hammered. Leslie is also due to arrive from New York before this evening’s show, to finish out the rest of the tour with them and inject life before the energy of perpetual motion can exhaust him of his last reserves of good humor. 

He closes his eyes and rubs wearily at a headache brewing above them—likely the result of last night’s chilly, drunken escapade. When he opens his eyes again, he finds Che watching him, still buried by the covers up to his nose. 

“What are we going to do,” Colin says, voice a flat, morning rasp. He often finds himself asking Che questions like this—questions without answers, not even worthy of equally ambiguous responses. Questions that erupt from somewhere inside him that seems particularly strong on weeks when he doesn’t have the show to ground him, or when the show isn’t grounded itself. Weeks when he’s afraid of how much he needs Che, of what such a need means. 

Che just shakes his head and reaches for his phone on the bedside table. Colin, still halfway cocooned in a tangled mass of duvet and Nantucket t-shirt and bedhead, collapses back into the pillows to be consumed by the haze of the unknown. 

 

 

  
“You’re going to have to fend off the groupies while I’m here, Colin,” Leslie is saying, wiggling her eyebrows. “You know how I get jealous.”

Colin shivers even as he laughs. Despite the St. Lo Cardinals sweatshirt he’d bought in the airport to replace his stolen coat, the cold wind is still blowing all the way through to his core with every swing of the bar’s revolving door. “I don’t know if I can. They’re relentless. It’s like I’m irresistible or something.”

Che snorts into his beer, eyes crinkling. 

“Che’s resolve seems to be holding up,” Leslie replies, motioning toward him with a smirk. Can it really be just a joke? Colin wonders. Or has she intuited all his secrets, the volatility the tour has created between him and Che, with just a glance?

It wouldn’t be the first time. 

“Barely,” Michael grumbles, taking a long drink and averting his eyes. 

“You two,” Leslie sighs, with a resigned shake of her head and a knowing smile. “Fucking clueless.” 

Colin feels himself beginning to blush and swallows it down with alcohol. It seems to be his preferred strategy for dealing with Che-related discomfort lately. 

“I miss the show,” Colin confesses, before she can say anything else. “I miss the routine and stress. I guess I always do, when there’s time off.”

“You’re like an addict,” Che says. “That’s psychotic.”

Colin shrugs helplessly. “I miss my sticky notes.”

“There’s something wrong with you.” Che leans back, throwing an arm around the back of Colin’s chair and eyeing him with an exasperated smile. They lock eyes, and suddenly Colin can’t look away; a swell of fondness rises in his throat and he wants nothing more than to be close to Che, to feel skin against skin, to worry nothing of the consequences. To be another person in another world. 

“There’s something wrong with both of you,” Leslie says, shaking her head again, but neither of them sees. 

 

 

 

All things come to an end, and Colin has never been so grateful to be back in New York by the end of the week, crammed into a subway car with the Monday morning rush hour crowd. A new coat, the same routine, Che waiting for him at work—the universe is righting itself, he thinks, slipping back into the mold of something he understands. They’ve survived the tour without undoing themselves, without undoing the careful balance between them, and now they’re once again on solid ground. Their resolves are impenetrable; surely, this must be true. 

By the time he arrives at 30 Rock, the cast and crew are in full crisis mode. 

This week’s host won’t leave her dressing room; Lorne is threatening to fire half the cast if they can’t get her out for preliminary costume fittings at the very least. Che is nowhere to be seen, apparently caught up in the orgy of rewriting happening in one of the head writer’s offices as they scramble to remove the host from as many main roles as possible. The fact that the show has already come unmoored and it’s only Monday does not bode well for the rest of the week, but Colin throws himself into chaos and tries not think beyond the next twenty minutes. 

He doesn’t resurface from the frenzy until nine at night, when Che appears in the door of his office with a bag of Thai takeout. 

“Everything’s all fucked up,” Colin says, by way of greeting. He reaches for the food as Che settles in on the other side of his desk. “Who knew?”

“Isn’t it always?” Che sighs out. Colin wonders, vaguely, if they’re still talking about the show. Regardless, it’s possible his devotion to “routine” is just an illusion; that the line between safety and chaos is much thinner than it looked in St. Louis. A return to rush hour and sticky notes can’t save him.

He catches Che’s eyes on him and knows, suddenly, that this is truth of it. The heart of the matter. 

There is no steady ground to be had—their capacity to undo each other is limitless. 

For a few long minutes, they chew in silence, and Colin realizes he’s trying to swallow a lump in his throat that is more than just noodles. He puts his fork down and takes a long, steadying breath. “Is this going to be our whole life?”

The infinite, unknowable tribulations of the show, or what’s lingering between the two of them—he doesn’t know which one he’s referring to, in all honesty. Michael seems to understand this, understand _him_. He always does. They always seem to be oscillating on the same wavelength, two parallel sinusoidal curves arcing off together into the distance. 

That thought itself is probably answer enough. 

“I dunno.” Michael shrugs, eyes directed carefully away as he rubs at something unseen on his bottom lip. “If you want it to be.”

“If it’s with you,” Colin finds himself saying, without a thought. He feels, for a moment, like he’s watching this conversation from the distant future, like he’s looking back on it as a turning point into something else. Something obfuscated but undeniably important, like the feeling of a dream just barely forgotten, the emotional residue of its intensity still clinging to the mind. 

“Good,” Che says, smiling at him, calling him back to the present. 

“Good,” Colin replies. Their hands are millimeters from each other on the desk. Colin is just starting to edge his fingers forward when Kyle Mooney appears in the doorway. 

“So I have this sketch idea I wanna run by you guys,” he starts in, oblivious. “It’s going to require a lot of set production, but—”

“Does it involve paper cranes?” Colin asks, feeling his heart skip. 

“....Um, no,” Kyle says, raising a perplexed eyebrow. “Should it?”

Colin just shakes his head, directing his eyes back down to his and Che’s hands on the desk. Not quite touching, but nevertheless immemorial in their togetherness. He can’t keep the smile off his face. 

 

 

  
In the dream, he’s folding cranes for Michael again. They accumulate on his laptop, on piles of spent scripts, around old takeout boxes. Che watches him work, silent and watchful, until he finally he crosses the room and cups Colin’s chin to kiss him. It’s more than gratitude, more than simple devotion—it’s that thing he’s afraid to name. That thing that follows them, that thing that destabilizes the world and the routine with every step. The heart of the matter. In the dream, Colin gives in. His hands slide against Che’s skin and he kisses back. They fit like puzzle pieces, like paper folded minutely to make one complex shape in its entirety. It’s a dream, Colin remembers distantly. Only a dream. 

But one day very soon, he’s beginning to think, it’s going to be something more.

**Author's Note:**

> lafayette1777.tumblr.com


End file.
